It’s Alive!!!

‘As the sun set on another sweltering day, Sophie’s eyes travelled dreamily across her back garden, scanned the distant lights of the town and paused on the twinkling diamonds above her. One twinkled brighter than the rest, or was it because it was getting larger?’

What a fab day I had at Handale Primary in their Year 1 class. The children across the school were having a fabulous ICT day with different events in each year group (Year 6 even visited a special event at Freebrough Academy nearby). My task was to use ICT to develop some quality writing….hmmm. Year 1, children I don’t know yet, ICT focus? Obvious really wasn’t it?

We worked on authorial intent and how that can be built into our story writing. After playing the children some soundtracks from a range of cartoons and asking them to reflect on what was happening in the cartoon at each point we identified that studying the music can reveal what the author wants the audience to feel. Simple. We kinda all know that but how often do we think about it? So I taught the children to use Garageband during the morning. They loved just banging out noises but when they realised how the Autoplay helped them to bring music together and make something really coherent they began to focus on the quality of what they were producing. Then I introduced the story:

Opening

Arrival

Action

Denouement

The children were led into the story by the opening lines at the beginning of the post and then we developed the plot together based on what we could see from the pictures. The children then had to write the score to each scene based on how the author of the story wants the reader/audience to feel at each stage. It is basically a sonic story mountain. Results were mixed although all the children became very engaged in the task and all of them could clearly articulate why they were creating the music that they were because of its impact on the audience in relation to the story. An example is below:

Whilst they were working we also had chance to create an alien creature (screen shot inserted into previous post) which was printed out on the 3D printer…just to add a bit of awe and wonder. Fab day and the staff involved were soooo onboard. They want to use the resulting videos (some of them! lol) to then drive the writing of the story, develop appropriate description, tension etc.